steep, where they paused to witness the
final tragedy. The half-breed turned to Hay Stockard.

"There is no god," he prompted.

The man laughed in reply. One of the young men poised a war-spear for
the cast.

"Hast thou a god?"

"Ay, the God of my fathers."

He shifted the axe for a better grip. Baptiste the Red gave the sign,
and the spear hurtled full against his breast. Sturges Owen saw the
ivory head stand out beyond his back, saw the man sway, laughing, and
snap the shaft short as he fell upon it. Then he went down to the river,
that he might carry to the Russians the message of Baptiste the Red, in
whose country there was no god.

THE GREAT INTERROGATION

I

To say the least, Mrs. Sayther's career in Dawson was meteoric. She
arrived in the spring, with dog sleds and French-Canadian _voyageurs_,
blazed gloriously for a brief month, and departed up the river as soon as
it was free of ice. Now womanless Dawson never quite understood this
hurried departure, and the local Four Hundred felt aggrieved and lonely
till the Nome strike was made and old sensations gave way to new. For it
had delighted in Mrs. Sayther, and received her wide-armed. She was
pretty, charming, and, moreover, a widow. And because of this she at
once had at heel any number of Eldorado Kings, officials, and adventuring
younger sons, whose ears were yearning for the frou-frou of a woman's
skirts.

The mining engineers revered the memory of her husband, the late Colonel
Sayther, while the syndicate and promoter representatives spoke awesomely
of his deals and manipulations; for he was known down in the States as a
great mining man, and as even a greater one in London. Why his widow, of
all women, should have come into the country, was the great
interrogation. But they were a practical breed, the men of the
Northland, with a wholesome disregard for theories and a firm grip on
facts. And to not a few of them Karen Sayther was a most essential fact.
That she did not regard the matter in this light, is evidenced by the
neatness and celerity with which refusal and proposal tallied off during
her four weeks' stay. And with her vanished the fact, and only the
interrogation remained.

To the solution, Chance vouchsafed one clew. Her last victim, Jack
Coughran, having fruitlessly laid at her feet both his heart and a five-
hundred-foot creek claim on Bonanza, celebrated the misfortune by walking
all of a night with the go